Thursday, November 27, 2008

Cambrian Explosion Re-Ignited By Protist

The culprit**************The Cambrian Explosion has once again blown up in the face of proponents of the evolutionary hypothesis. This time the culprit is a one-celled organism from the phylum "protozoa" which can still be found alive at the bottom of the ocean floor.

The Cambrian Explosion refers to the sudden appearance (in geological terms)of basically every phyla of animal life alive today (and a lot more that are not alive today) in fossilized rock which they estimate to be about 543 million years old. The problem the Cambrian Explosion poses for evolution (macro-evolution that is, not variation within type) is that when everything shows up at the same time, its not evolution! You have layers and layers of rock without fossils of bilaterally symmetrical animals and then all of a sudden you come to the Cambrian layer and it is chock full of fossils of diverse and developed types. Where did all these critters come from?

"Science" texts tend to deal with this issue by basically ignoring it, either not using the phrase "Cambrian Explosion" or giving it passing mention. They also try grasping onto any thread of fossil evidence that there might have been a few bilaterally symmetrical animal life forms crawling around in the Precambrian. These would be the creatures that all the other stuff evolved from.

For many years (until they were able to re-classify Kimberella into something more convenient) they relied on "trace fossils" of "worm tracks" to show that there were other such animals around. Now a scientist has discovered a very large Protists making tracks that look exactly like the "worm tracks" in the Precambrian mud. A Protists is a is a single-celled organism rather than an animal, the cell in this case is swollen up to the size of a grape, and the creature moves by extending pseudopod like an amoeba. The tracks though, look just like the fossil "worm tracks" that they have been attributing to the alleged Precambrian worms. Those tracks were the key fossil evidence they had for an ancestor to all non-mollusk bilateral animals. Which is to say the vast majority of them.

With this discovery, the Precambrian Explosion once again becomes significant fossil evidence against the macro-evolutionary hypothesis.

2 Comments:

but one more note: Kimberella, the current fav to be the ancestor of the mollusks, was classified as a jellyfish for years. I don't think they have given enough thought to the idea that this creature was one of the foraminiferans, which is another single-celled organism, but one that could get really large and had multiple nuclei. The traits seem to line up really well.